Comment Re:I switched to Intel boards (Score 1) 352
thanks SWB - this is good advice
Comment What works for Hackintosh... (Score 1) 352
What works for a Hackintosh will usually work well for Linux. Check http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/search/label/CustoMac. These builds have been well tested and I've used them for Ubuntu successfully.
Submission + - Amazon Web Services Down In North Virginia (forbes.com)
thanosv writes: I wonder if Amazon's competitors and sharpening their knives. Seriously do other readers have any cheap suggestions on how to manage these problems?
Comment ... for Great Good! (Score 1) 360
Two great tutorials for two great languages:
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!: http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters
or
Learn You some Erlang: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/
These languages are different from the herd yet particle (Erlang more so). Erlang is used in hundreds of products and systems and it's paradigm matches our real world.
Comment Re:Oh good grief (Score 1) 285
You are right in that context it's not a bad course - still the level is pretty puerile. I guess it's good to keep the young stupid....
Comment Boring and poorly structured. (Score 1) 285
I enrolled but it could never engage me. It was poor in depth and structure. I tried on it my children (11 & 16) and they found it boring and a bit too slow. I guess it could pass for 6th grade content but never for a university course. I guess I though I would be getting something similar to Downey's Think Stats or the Heads Up Series - which I don't like but is generally well thought out and well pitched. I can't help feeling that this is like everything else out of the google stables - well hyped but half baked - Yes if this is the way forward I can only feel content that my education was a cut above the rest and there will be plenty of highly paid work available for me right until my death.
Comment Restricted Items.. (Score 1) 1198
That branch is well know for peddling. Their employees make next to nothing and so like to augment their income... ...just like in casino's and certain street corners photography is not welcome.
Submission + - Google Announces Compute Engine - At Last An Alternative to Amazon AWS
mikejuk writes: Google's Compute Engine is the first credible alternative to Amazon's AWS. Until today the cloud was Amazon — now at last it's a two-horse race (or more).
The announcement includes the line:
"...allows Google Compute Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading cloud providers"
And we know who "other leading cloud providers" are! A full price table is available and from this, for example, a single core image with 3.75GB and 420Gbytes of storage is $0.145 per hour, which is a lot more power than the same rate would buy at AWS.
The announcement includes the line:
"...allows Google Compute Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading cloud providers"
And we know who "other leading cloud providers" are! A full price table is available and from this, for example, a single core image with 3.75GB and 420Gbytes of storage is $0.145 per hour, which is a lot more power than the same rate would buy at AWS.
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Defines Good Developer Culture?
An anonymous reader writes: We are a team of 6 people developing applications for mobile devices (Android & iOS). In our company, which consists of many teams responsible for "classic" software development, business intelligence, virtualization, hardware, etc., we are kind of a small startup because we were the first to use agile methods like Scrum and we are open to new technologies and methods. Also our team is pretty young with me being the oldest with 30 years.
We would like to further raise productivity and motivation and thus are currently collecting points which make up a good developer/hacker culture and which may be improved in our team/company. This can be points that we can either improve ourselves or have to pass on to management.
I would like to know what in your opinion defines good, modern developer culture? What does developer culture consists of?
For example is it
- clearly defined career opportunities
- geeky office
- benefits like trips to extraordinary conferences like WWDC or Google I/O
- ...
Please let me know.
We would like to further raise productivity and motivation and thus are currently collecting points which make up a good developer/hacker culture and which may be improved in our team/company. This can be points that we can either improve ourselves or have to pass on to management.
I would like to know what in your opinion defines good, modern developer culture? What does developer culture consists of?
For example is it
- clearly defined career opportunities
- geeky office
- benefits like trips to extraordinary conferences like WWDC or Google I/O
-
Please let me know.
Submission + - RIP 'Software' Companies; Hello 'Data' Companies (forbes.com)
onlynmkj writes: This has a lot of implications for a range of organizations. The crossover from being purely a software provider to a data empire-builder seems like a natural transition many software players could make. As part of a move to the cloud, for example, they could provide metrics and monitoring data that help customers run more efficiently.
Submission + - 7000 Irish e-voting machines to be scrapped (independent.ie)
lampsie writes: You may recall back in January 2012 that the Irish government had deemed their stock of 7000 e-voting machines 'worthless'. Turns out they are not — after spending upwards of €54 million euro purchasing them almost a decade ago, all 7000 will now be scrapped for €70,000 (just over nine euros each). The machines were scrapped because 'they could not be guaranteed to be safe from tampering [...] and they could not produce a printout so that votes/results could be double-checked.'
Submission + - Write BASIC, run Java (wordpress.com)
An anonymous reader writes: BINSIC allows you to write BASIC code, as though for an old Sinclair machine, and run it anywhere you have Java. Source code is available and it comes with code to run Conway's Game of Life.
BINSIC is actually written in Groovy, which runs atop the JVM but is supplied in JAR form and so can be used just as a Java JAR.
BINSIC is actually written in Groovy, which runs atop the JVM but is supplied in JAR form and so can be used just as a Java JAR.
Submission + - UK Hacktivists From LulzSec Plead Guilty To Charges (seo-micrositez.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: LulzSec is a hacking organisation that started in 2011. They are a division of the group,Anonymous, who are well known for hacking both Mastercard and PayPal. They have been running into a fairly large amount of legal trouble as of late, due to the ringleader of the hacktivist group, Sabu, turning into an informant after his FBI arrest.
Submission + - Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, Society Will Adapt, But Public Too Dumb
Freshly Exhumed writes: In a speech Wednesday, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said. Tillerson blamed a public that is "illiterate" in science and math, a "lazy" press, and advocacy groups that "manufacture fear" for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Comment Couchdb is great when it's used right (Score 1) 283
Clues to the source of some of Sauce Labs' problems can be gleamed from their list of Maintenance headaches:
View indexes are only updated when queried — insertion does not update the index. That means you have to write a script to periodically run all your views, unless you want them to be surprisingly slow when they haven’t been queried in a while. In practice we always preferred view availability to any performance boost obtained by not updating indexes on insertion, but writing reliable scripts to keep view indexes up to date was tricky.
Oh please doing an HTTP GET periodically is tricky ??? No it's not. With couchdb if your database is very dynamic you should either index periodically and very frequently. This creates a quantified and controlled performance demand on the server. Ideally read servers should never be the write server and replication should be filtered. Using Couchdb naively will lead to failure. Don't use javascript views, python views are 3-4 x faster, erlang views are 7-10 faster. Used in the right way and following the many tips that you can get from the Couchdb community will make Couchdb not just a great database but a great application platform.
And yes 1.2 is a great improvement.
Currently I'm using coucdb, mongodb, and MySQL all in one high profile project handling terabytes of data and millions of hits. Each has it's use. When it comes to reliability and performance all three DBs are NOT my problem.
